So, you recently bought or were gifted an Echo, Echo Dot, or another Echo device, and it's sitting in your kitchen, silently awaiting your next order. Before you can ask your Alexa-powered Echo to play your favorite Spotify playlist or to turn on your living room lights, you'll need to tweak a few key settings. Get the scoop on how to train Alexa to recognize your voice, keep her from letting just anyone buy stuff on Amazon, tell her where you live and work, and more. As soon as your new Echo is up and running, Alexa can start answering your questions and doing your bidding. That said, it's a good idea to help Alexa get accustomed to your voice as soon as possible.

It's all too easy to overlook the quality of the remote control when picking a streaming device, as I've written before. You might not realize it from the price tag, for instance, but the $180 Apple TV 4K has one of the worst remotes on the market. The slim design too easily slips between couch cushions, and its trackpad-based controls have a steep learning curve. Conversely, the $29 Roku Express seems like a great value until you realize that its remote lacks basic TV controls. What's a cord-cutter to do, then? If you're stuck with a bad remote, consider a third-party replacement instead of buying an entirely new streaming device.

Google is facing a lawsuit surrounding allegations that it illegally tracked millions of people through their phones, even after they set their privacy settings to disable the sharing of their location history. Napoleon Patacsil of San Diego is seeking class-action status on behalf of US users of Android phones and Apple iPhones who were tracked against their will and knowledge. Mr Patacsil claims Google's "principal goal" was to "surreptitiously monitor" phone users and let third parties do the same. "Google represented that a user'can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.' This simply was not true," the complaint states.

A glitch with Google Translate has resulted in a series of mysterious messages and prophecies appearing when gibberish text is entered into the app. The translation service, which supports over 100 languages and serves over 500 million people each day, uses artificial intelligence to increase accuracy. But the technology has also caused an issue with some of the lesser-used languages. Typing in the word "dog" 18 times into Google Translate and selecting the input language as Maori results in the following message: "Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus' return." You can view your Google Maps History by visiting myactivity.google.com. In the search bar at the top of the page, you can filter by lots of different products, and Maps is one of them.

EDIT* This guide was written for fastai version 1, which at the current date and time (Jan 2018) is in the midst of transitioning to the a newer version, dubbed fastai v2. An updated guide will be coming soon. As a deep learning enthusiast in Malaysia, one of the biggest issues I have is securing a cheap GPU option to run my models on. If you're like me and come from a country where paying $80-$100 every month for AWS GPUs is too expensive, I'll show you how I set up a my GPU on GCP without incurring any cost at all. In this article I'll walk you through setting up a google cloud computing instance with a 500gb SSD, a 3.75gb ram Broadwell CPU and a Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU.

Siri had a good run, but its time in the spotlight is over. Alexa has arrived, and it's way smarter than Siri. Alexa, of course, is the voice-activated "smart" assistant lurking inside the Amazon Echo, Amazon Echo Dot and Amazon Tap products. If you own one of these gadgets, you probably know the basics by now--you can ask Alexa for today's weather forecast, a daily news briefing, an oven timer or a favorite playlist. But as the Echo family of products has grown, so has the ecosystem that surrounds it.

There's no denying that our smartphones have made our lives so much easier, putting our contacts and schedules, our driving directions, the whole internet, right at our fingertips. But if you're using an Android phone you might be leaving even more convenience on the table. There are a bunch of super-smart settings in Nougat and Google Now that'll make your Android device feel like it's 10 steps ahead of you. Your Android phone can be proactively telling you how long it'll take to get to work in the morning, and nudging you when your favorite team is about to take the field. Your device can keep itself unlocked whenever it's on you, and those snapshots you just took can automatically be arranged into beautiful collages.